Peggy Noonan forgets the 11th commandment that her former boss is accredited with,”Thou shalt not speak ill of other Republicans.” In her column today she dissects Palin, bit-by-bit. Her column may go down in history as the knock-out punch that derails the Sarah 2012 train.It should, but it won’t. Noonan destroys the myths that Republicans have been telling themselves about why Palin was not (is not) successful last year. The GOP has to have this discussion sometime. For example:

I love her because she’s so working-class.” This is a favorite of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status..

“She’s not Ivy League, that’s why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don’t have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism.” This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware

“The elites hate her.” The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her

She makes the Republican Party look inclusive.” She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated. “She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes.” She shows your cynicism

Noonan, an elite, speaks of intellectuals but does not look at Palin through the eyes of the middle-class women who admire her for non political reasons. She’s one of them. She is raising a family while maintaining a professional political career (until July 26) at the same time. I am not in either category but I know from some of my friends that this is her appeal to conservative women. Many of which had no interest in politics until she came along. That yoke will be hard to break.

Sarah Palin reminds me of a saying that one of my professors’ used to say, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” I am not even sure Palin knows where to start.